Description
The assumption that protest in nondemocratic contexts is always met with repression remains widely held, but rarely investigated. My doctoral research challenges prevailing assumptions through an investigation of the response of Central Asian governments to street protest and seeks to understand why these governments sometimes respond to protest with concessions.
Using Protest Event Analysis (PEA), I have constructed a dataset of protest events and government responses in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, between 2014 and 2019. This data generates two key findings. Firstly, protests were frequently met with concessions in all three cases. Secondly, whilst protest events were less frequent in Uzbekistan, when they did occur, they were more likely to win concessions than protests in either Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan.
I am testing the plausibility of a novel theoretical framework to account for this surprising finding. I hypothesise that protest functioned as a mechanism of communication between state and society, allowing the government to identify and respond to popular demands as part of a long-term survival strategy.
Popular mobilisation has the potential to bring down presidents, but it also presents them with an opportunity to respond to popular opinion. Protest may thus play a stabilising function whilst representing an immediate crisis.
